(no subject)

[mudron]

"In a house on the main shopping street of Pompeii, a pair of human skeletons lies. And on the wall beside them, in brightly colored brush strokes, this image is displayed: flowers and songbirds living in a green world on the slopes of a mountain. And by the aid of PCR, and electron microprobe, and computer, DNA from the bones teaches us that the skeletons were father and son. In August of A.D. 79, the pair climbed atop a knee-deep drift of volcanic dust that had snowed down from the mount and flowed indoors - flowed from the very same mountain depicted upon the wall. The boy, aged about fourteen years, is lying on his back upon the drift. His jaw hangs open at an angle suggestive of a last conscious moment spent gaping like a fish, and trying to swallow air. His head is turned to one side, as if to fix his gaze forever upon his father's outstretched left hand. They died, apparently, at the same instant, their fingers gently entwined.

In the Vesuvian ash, among bones shut out from starlight and from sunlight for close on two thousand years, I have gazed into the eyeless sockets of a skull that never lived to see a pocket-computer-assisted scientist, never lived to see flying machines above the mount or space station Alpha speeding beneath the stars. And though the empire of Rome stretches far and awat, like a civilization completely alien to us, the bones speak of our common humanity, speak still, from their last second of life, of love and mutual tenderness."

- Charles Pellegrino